Giving voice to speakers from the past

Apr. 11, 2013

D.C. Everest Senior High School senior Ryan Eisenman wants to earn his doctorate in history and teach at the college level. / Dan Young/Gannett Central Wisconsin Media

About Ryan Eisenman

Age: 18 Residence: Schofield School: D.C. Everest Senior High School Parents: Louis and Cheryl Eisenman College plans: To attend Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., the University of Chicago in Chicago or the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to major in history. He hopes to eventually earn a doctorate in history and become a college professor. Hobbies: Acting in D.C. Everest Senior High School plays and musicals, singing in choir at school and church.

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SCHOFIELD — When Ryan Eisenman was in eighth grade, he and a few other history students began to work on a traveling Civil War Memorial.

The idea came from his history teacher at the time, Nancy Gajewski, and he and others grabbed hold and ran with it. He recalls helping design the memorial, which was made of wood and looked similar to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. As part of the project, the group had to get the names of all 12,000 Wisconsin casualties of the Civil War from the Wisconsin Historical Society and put them in alphabetical order.

Eisenman already had established himself as an exemplary student, a good writer with a mind that was curious about the stories of the past. But his work on that project then helped cement the plans he has now, as a senior at D.C. Everest Senior High School with a 4.0 grade point average and an ambition to earn a doctorate in history, to become a history professor. As part of the project, Eisenman visited local veterans groups, to explain what the project was and ask for help to pay for it.

He found that, even generations away from the Civil War, each one of the soldiers who gave their lives in the conflict mattered, that their stories mattered.

“Now looking back, I think I discovered that I wanted to use history to tell the stories of people who might not necessarily have had a voice in their past,” Eisenman said.

Eisenman, like all history buffs, wants to know and understand the large personalities, leaders and other forces that change the course of the world. But he also wants to study the ordinary people who were affected by the large events.

“We often read about the movers and shakers, the people of power,” he said. “We don’t often hear from the people who are moved and shook by them.”

As a leader in the D.C. Everest Oral History Project, Eisenman interviewed people who survived the Holocaust, and he helped create a book that published his and other students’ interviews. When he attended an event in Milwaukee to unveil the book, he was reminded of how powerful stories are when people the book profiled hugged and thanked him.

Telling the stories of history, he hopes, will help make the future better; at the very least, the stories can give meaning to the past.

“There has to be someone who will remember their experiences and record them,” he said.

Eisenman rounds out his academic work with a passion for theater and music. Theater, especially, “is an outlet,” he said. “You can expel all your creativity and get immediate feedback.”

Eisenman already has made an impact on the community, said Tom Johansen, D.C. Everest Senior High School principal.

“He is one of those rare students who engages in multiple school activities, serves in leadership positions, fills his schedule with our most rigorous classes, takes time to provide service to the school and community,” Johansen said. “I am confident that Ryan will continue to be a contributing and successful student and citizen in any college or university he chooses to attend.”